January 2, 1998

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Fundamentalism is spreading westward; now it has invaded the Maghreb. The results of Algeria’s June 12 local elections, in which the Islamic Salvation Front (F.J.S.) won more than half of the country’s town halls, including Algiers, Oran and all the other big cities, were stunning–but not really surprising. The National Liberation Front (F.L.N.), which has run the country for the twenty-eight years since independence, is falling apart like the regimes of Eastern Europe. Once it stood for resistance to French colonialism. Now, for the bulk of the population, it stands for mismanagement, injustice and corruption. After the bloody riots of October 1988, in which several hundred young people were killed, President Chadli Benjedid opted for both political and economic liberalization. But in a country whose ever-present economic crisis is aggravated today by dwindling oil revenues, and where nearly a quarter of the labor force is jobless, these liberal remedies have meant still more striking inequalities in living standards and an even greater degree of popular discontent.

The F.I.S., set up only sixteen months ago, has taken advantage of this mood. True, it has no economic solutions to offer beyond liberalism and Islamic law. Its education and family policies are enough to send shivers down the spine of Algeria’s many emancipated women. But the Islamic Front has managed to emerge as the main moral alternative to the discredited F.L.N., and on June 12 it was helped by an election boycott by the two main opposition parties that kept 35 percent of voters away from the polls. The leader of the F.I.S., Abassi al-Madani, a white-robed, bearded former Algiers University professor, now wants to turn his municipal victory into a parliamentary and then a presidential triumph. Quite understandably, he is in a hurry.

But the other side, for opposite reasons, is not. Will President Benjedid finally yield to the pressure for early elections? Will the F.L.N. split? Will the army take sides, or will it play its own game? Above all, will the lay and democratic forces, which are not negligible in Algeria, find time to mobilize and provide an alternative platform that is both radical and realistic, one that offers hope and dignity to the rising generation? The answers to those questions are crucial, for the success or failure of the Islamic Front in Algeria will have an impact on Tunisia and Morocco, the other countries of the Maghreb, as well as on the immigrant population in France. Much is at stake, although it should be added–in fairness to the Algerians–that the Muslim world is not the only place in today’s political arena in which the secular left appears unable to arrest the forward march of irrational forces.

Daniel SingerDaniel Singer, for many years The Nation's Paris-based Europe correspondent, was born on September 26, 1926, in Warsaw, was educated in France, Switzerland and England and died on December 2, 2000, in Paris.
He was a contributor to The Economist, The New Statesman and the Tribune and appeared as a commentator on NPR, "Monitor Radio" and the BBC, as well as Canadian and Australian broadcasting. (These credits are for his English-language work; he was also fluent in French, Polish, Russian and Italian.)
He was the author of Prelude to Revolution: France in May 1968 (Hill & Wang, 1970), The Road to Gdansk (Monthly Review Press, 1981), Is Socialism Doomed?: The Meaning of Mitterrand (Oxford, 1988) and Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours? (Monthly Review Press, 1999).
A specialist on the Western European left as well as the former Communist nations, Singer ranged across the Continent in his dispatches to The Nation. Singer sharply critiqued Western-imposed economic "shock therapy" in the former Eastern Bloc and US support for Boris Yeltsin, sounded early warnings about the re-emergence of Fascist politics into the Italian mainstream, and, across the Mediterranean, reported on an Algeria sliding into civil war.
The Daniel Singer Millennium Prize Foundation was founded in 2000 to honor original essays that help further socialist ideas in the tradition of Daniel Singer.